This perfectly embodies the kind of hacker spirit that I love.

Reminds me of the LoLRa project from cnlohr that transmits LoRa without a radio transceiver.

I despise these wheels. About 15 years ago, my wife and I went to Target and first went to lunch at the far end of the parking lot. After lunch we headed into the store, grabbed a cart, now loaded with our newborn in his car seat, and our two year old sitting in the cart. A quick shopping trip later, we headed back to the car. When crossing the Target parking lot, the wheels locked up, in the middle of the road. Cart wouldn’t budge. Traffic all over the place, and now I have to pull both my children out, along with the shopping, and carry them all to my car. Pissed is an understatement. After my wife and kids were secured back in the car, I retuned to Target, complaining to the manager. A shrug was the best I received. Why did they need to put the wire in the middle of the road???

I hope someone attaches Bluetooth speakers to their shoes and locks every cart in target, so they have to remove the system.

Author's bio line says they are a "flat mooner". Which gave me quite a chuckle.

That talk was incredible. Thanks for posting this and now I want to find them in the wild.

You can also take a wrench with you, to quickly remove the locking wheel from your cart. Maybe replace it with a non-locking wheel from another cart.

Shouldn't be difficult to find carts left near or beyond the edge of the parking lot.

I find the locking wheels annoying, because they're so often defective and make it a noisy struggle to get your cart through the store. But years ago I also had a neighbor in my apartment complex who would walk home with a cart every week, and would just leave (a dozen of) them there... she couldn't be bothered to push the empty carts back to the store, not even once. I'd think a $1 deposit/return system for carts would work better, and give the homeless in the area some gainful employment.

I suppose now I can admit that we did this in college in 2003 (with RF, not audio), and had great fun seeing a grocery store descend into utter pandemonium, until the power electronics overheated and burned the signal carrier to whose chest the circuit had been taped, who started yelping in the store and drawing a lot of suspicion to himself.